Month: January 2008

We have been experiencing very slow web page loading times on the MacBook (via Firefox). After reading lots on blogs and the like of people complaining, I found one note that struck a cord with me on talking about OpenDNS. The slowness was almost pin-able to DNS as all the waiting for data from x.com type stuff went by in a flash, after the huge pause was over.

So I did a side by side compare of loading a sub-page on Trade Me, on the old Window PC vs. the new MacBook. Using the same Wifi. The PC won hands down. In fact it finished before the Mac had started.

With it in hand I decided to see how the networks were different.

Long story short-er-ish, The Mac was getting IP & DNS settings from the router, and the PC had them manually configured. Applying manual setting to the MacBook, and hay presto… fast page loads. Yay!

So this is a case of the ‘auto-magic just works’ causing problems, as it wasn’t the best solution, but it did work mostly.

Five days into being a Mac user, and on the whole I like it. Here is my running thoughts:

Had Dashboard crash (well Michaela did actually)

Had Firefox crash

I really like the parental controls.

The kids really love GarageBand

After days of telling Michaela you could use two fingers on the track pad to do a right click, I found Rod’s blog post, (where I read about the feature originally) only to discover that it was not on by default. That explains my lack of success.

Found the Super DragAndGo extension, so now I don’t need a middle click to browse with tabs.

Found this support note saying why I couldn’t find Boot Camp Assistance, and why I also couldn’t find how to install it. This was really driving be batty

So, now I have Boot Camp, I’ll start the Windows XP install, and then be able to decommission my current desktop PC. Yeah!

Wow – one of the problems that caused me grief on the programming challenges web site was 110104 LC-Display. Today when I logged in I noticed it was now marked as solved, yet I haven’t submitted that problem for 3 years. It also appears that I had 5 different correct solutions, that were originally marked wrong.

So someone has reviewed that problem, and found the judge solution was wrong, and re-evaluated all submissions. It’s good to see the site is still alive.

Pity they don’t have a forum as this was a good place to discus tricky problems, and give clues for the easier problems.

My 110206 Erdös Numbers solution is now showing as Compilation error (for all 160 submissions), so I might try and track that down…

My first laptop, and it’s a MacBook. I have gone to the white-side. Seems perfectly good so far. The lappy is faster than my workstation at work, and more than twice the processor than my old desktop at home. I’m connected to the work wireless network, so I’m ready to start installing extra software.

The only issue is I’m currently using a Microsoft mouse, in the USB port….

That and my formatting like paragraphs are not sticking in Safari. Now that I have changed to Firefox, things are more normal. Didn’t think it would be that easy to drop a key package. Safari (mac) == IE (windows), to be avoided!